Is there anything?
May 16, 2014 5:59:06 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on May 16, 2014 5:59:06 GMT -5
Wittgenstein was terribly overconfident, rather shallow, and left us a great many loose ends, so I would suggest that the best way to start seeking out why there is something and not nothing would be to go back and consult jolly old Socrates himself, as portrayed in the Theaitetos. Theaitetos is introduced there as "an unusually intelligent, uncommonly gentle, and exceptionally masculine" youth.
Socrates: The sense of wonder is characteristic of a philosopher; wonder, in fact, is the very source of speculation, and he who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas was a good genealogist. . . . Look around and see that none of the uninitiated overhears us. By the uninitiated I mean those who fancy that nothing is real except what they can grasp firmly with their hands, and who deny that actions or processes or anything invisible can share in reality.
Theaitetos: What hard, repellent folk they sound!
Socrates: So they are too, quite without refinement. . . .
We still see that in our everyday life do we not. The next real step forward was taken by Fichte, when he simply reflected further than most people before him (or indeed after) had ever done.
"The self's own positing of itself is its own pure activity," he wrote in the Science of Knowledge. "The self posits itself, and simply by virtue of this self-assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing. It is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action and deed are one and the same, and hence the ultimate ground, 'I am,' expresses an Act, and the only one possible."
After that, one might in passing consider van Beethoven's last quartette: "Must it be? . . . It must be." And another obvious one is Satre's big book Being and Nothingness; it will certainly be rewarding!
Finally, the Parmenides, Fifth Antinomy, has a long passage on the subject; but it may be rather too much to take in all at once.
Socrates: The sense of wonder is characteristic of a philosopher; wonder, in fact, is the very source of speculation, and he who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas was a good genealogist. . . . Look around and see that none of the uninitiated overhears us. By the uninitiated I mean those who fancy that nothing is real except what they can grasp firmly with their hands, and who deny that actions or processes or anything invisible can share in reality.
Theaitetos: What hard, repellent folk they sound!
Socrates: So they are too, quite without refinement. . . .
We still see that in our everyday life do we not. The next real step forward was taken by Fichte, when he simply reflected further than most people before him (or indeed after) had ever done.
"The self's own positing of itself is its own pure activity," he wrote in the Science of Knowledge. "The self posits itself, and simply by virtue of this self-assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing. It is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action and deed are one and the same, and hence the ultimate ground, 'I am,' expresses an Act, and the only one possible."
After that, one might in passing consider van Beethoven's last quartette: "Must it be? . . . It must be." And another obvious one is Satre's big book Being and Nothingness; it will certainly be rewarding!
Finally, the Parmenides, Fifth Antinomy, has a long passage on the subject; but it may be rather too much to take in all at once.